Handsome @anson@qoto.org

Seems like a good day for a reminder of how quick studios are to screw over writers. In 1999, NBC moved a series from their regular network to Sci Fi Channel. My pay went from $240,000 to $0. Because my contract paid "per broadcast episode" instead of just "per episode."

The series ran. I just got nothing.

If you drag an emoji family with a string size of 11 into an input with maxlength=10, one of the children will disappear.

Hey, folks. Big layoffs at DigitalOcean today, and my team and I were hit. In fact, so was my adjacent team, and a good chunk of my department. I don't have much reach here on Mastodon yet, but if anybody wants to discuss opportunities for a technical editor / writer / manager of same, I'm up for it.

incredible stuff here Bing

On the flip side, time card fraud *is* a felony, and people regularly go to jail for it. Timecard fraud is when an employee:

* Knows that their pay is determined by when they clock in and clock out
* Knowingly clocks in when they are not working, or clocks out significantly after they have stopped working

I don't understand why stealing $1000 in one direction is a felony that DAs give people years for, but in the other it's a civil matter where restitution and a fine are the usual punishments.

Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to answer everything themselves: longer snippets, inline FAQs, search results full of knowledge panels.

Today's Bard announcement feels like their natural evolution: extracting all value out of the internet for themselves, burying pages at the bottom of each GPT-generated essay like footnotes. https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/

What a lovely shade of orange

wouldn't it be funny if-.. no, it couldn't be

but maybe, let's have a peek...

I appreciate the intention of fundraisiers to support "kids with outstanding lunch balances" but what kind of country makes kids to go into debt to eat?

If there's any better use for the taxes I pay than feeding hungry kids, I don't know of it. FEED EVERY KID, EVERY TIME, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

I've been reading "C++ has become a legacy language" a lot recently; I'm curious what you think.

Has or will C++ become a legacy language in the near future? For this poll, "legacy language" means a language that is mostly driven by inertia and enthusiasts and does not or should not be used for new projects.

Please boost for reach.

#cpp #cplusplus #rust #safety

The #balloon: let me drop some knowledge. (A thread) I co-founded the largest high-altitude ballooning project in history and was for years its chief technical architect and lead designer. I’m referring to Google [x]’s Project Loon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC). I have deep practical and operational knowledge about high-altitude ballooning; I’ve designed many iterations of these vehicles and personally overseen dozens of launch operations.

One thing I'll say for the wave of Republican book-banning that's going on right now -- it's certainly making books seem powerful and *significant*

Book-banning is a terrible way to have the public re-realize the catalytic effect a good book can have on its readers

But here we are: https://boingboing.net/2023/01/31/unable-to-burn-digital-books-orange-unified-school-district-bans-the-whole-virtual-library.html

"JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) has selected Microchip to design and manufacture the multi-core High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) microprocessor SoC based on eight #RISCV X280 cores from SiFive ... with four additional RISC-V cores added for general-purpose computing"

https://www.eejournal.com/article/nasa-recruits-microchip-sifive-and-risc-v-to-develop-12-core-processor-soc-for-autonomous-space-missions/

Hey #astronomy #space #rocketscience folks:

Is there a word to describe atmospheric aero-braking with the intent to disintegrate the object in question?

Like the theories about intentionally destroying ice asteroids in Mars' atmosphere for terraforming.

I feel like "aero-braking" has the connotation of wanting to keep the object in one piece.

Is there a term for intentional aero-disintegration?

This is the kinda thing that gets me real excited!

Heard this through Joss Bland-Hawthorn, this article discusses the need to set up a Lunar timescale.

Time, at the moment, is connected to Earth's clocks - even for spacecraft out in far reaches of the Solar System.

Eventually, we are going to need a timescale that works across the whole Solar System universally.

Steps are being considered for the lunar timescale ...

BUT .... IMHO, we need to think bigger ... (see next toot)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00185-z

#Timing #Moon #Navigation #Astrophysics #Astrodon